The UN Security Council: From the Cold War to the 21st Century

EXCERPTED FROM
The UN Security Council:
From the Cold War
to the 21st Century
edited by
David M. Malone
Copyright © 2004
ISBNs: 1-58826-215-4 hc 1-58826-240-5 pb
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1
Introduction
DAVID M. MALONE
Why this volume now? Much has changed for the United Nations Security
Council since the end of the Cold War. Its decisions—largely improvised
and inconsistent though they may be—have, for good and ill, profoundly
affected international relations. Among other things, the Council’s decisions
have eroded conceptions of state sovereignty firmly held during the
Cold War years, altering the way in which many of us see the relationship
between state and citizen the world over.
Two crises in international relations centered on Iraq, in 1990–1991
and in 2002–2003, have led to two totally different views of the UN in general
and the Council in particular. Following the first, marked by the mobilization
of many countries to eject Iraqi occupation forces from Kuwait
under a strong Council mandate, extraordinary and unjustified euphoria
took hold among practitioners and some scholars about the potential of the
UN to serve as the agent for the “new world order” advertised by President
George H. W. Bush in 1990. At the time of the second crisis, obituaries
were written for the UN, as well as for the idea of international order that it
represents. In both cases, these extreme views of the UN suggested that
international practitioner, media, and scholarly opinion was not rooted in a
sound understanding of what the Security Council is good at and what it is
bad at. Moreover, there was a general failure to understand how the
Council continues to coexist with an older form of international relations
still based on sovereign states pursuing their various national interests. This
volume seeks to give a rounded assessment of the strengths and weaknesses
of the Council as an institution. It also seeks to identify what is novel and
what may be enduring in its approaches to a widening agenda of international
security issues since the end of the Cold War.
Given the centrality of individual state interests at the UN, however
unpalatable to some, the question arises as to whether the Council, in terms
of the perceived legitimacy of its decisions, can be more than the sum of its
1

2 INTRODUCTION
parts. Perhaps the key driver in Council decisions today, both actively and
passively, is the agenda of the United States. This has raised questions
about the extent to which the Council can resist (beyond the Iraq issue) the
“pull” of U.S. policy preferences. As of mid-2003, there is also concern
that the Council could find itself confined to mandating UN humanitarian,
peacekeeping, and transitional government mop-up operations after U.S.-
led military interventions. This tension—between military and political
power and the power of legitimacy—runs through this volume.
Aim and Scope
It is hard enough to take a snapshot of the Council, with its long agenda,
opaque proceedings, and uncertain impact on international relations, at any
given time. Perhaps for this reason, the Council has not been addressed
often other than through the lens of international law, a particular crisis, or
one individual’s memoirs. Sidney Bailey and Sam Daws’s magisterial volume
on the Council’s procedures, which also covers with great acuity a
number of substantive issues, is the principal reference tool for students of
the Council. 1 Other brief but incisive overviews were offered by Sir Brian
Urquhart and the late Sir Anthony Parsons in the early 1990s, but they are
now mostly of historical interest. 2 The Council today displays elements of
continuity with the Council described so admirably by Andrew Boyd in
Fifteen Men on a Powder Keg more than thirty years ago, not least with
respect to the salience of national interest within it. 3 However, with the
geopolitical setting completely altered by the end of the Cold War, the
issues addressed by the Council and the way in which they are addressed
have evolved radically. Furthermore, the Council occasionally today features
female ambassadors, most recently including Madeleine Albright of
the United States and Patricia Durant of Jamaica.
By slicing and dicing in many different ways the Council’s decisions
and activities, the substantive themes of its work, and the institutional
developments in its life, this volume attempts to assess its objectives and
performance during the turbulent, frequently hyperactive years it has experienced
in the post–Cold War era. The contributors represent a mix of practitioners,
many of whom have served on the Council or sought to implement
its mandates; knowledgeable academics, a number of whom have
published extensively on related topics; and members of the community of
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) interacting frequently with the
Council.
As in any endeavor of this type, even an ambitious and long one such
as this, choices were required. The reader might wonder why we address
certain trends and not others—for example, why we do not offer a chapter
on developments in peacekeeping. As topics like this one are addressed in a

DAVID M. MALONE 3
number of chapters from a variety of perspectives, we decided that offering
a synthesis chapter covering them risked repetition. In other instances, we
thought that a particular phenomenon or case, no matter how important or
interesting in its own right, shed little more light on the workings and aims
of the Council than did some other case offered in the volume. Accordingly,
while we do present in Chapter 7 a thoughtful exploration by Elizabeth
Cousens of the Council’s tentative and unconvincing approach to conflict
prevention, we do not devote a chapter to peacebuilding (or “nation-building”
as U.S. government officials sometimes refer to it) because a number
of our case chapters deal with the inadequacies of the Council’s strategies
to date for sustaining the peace it sometimes helps to establish. As for Iraq,
its importance has been such within the Council that it is addressed in many
of the chapters, centrally so in those on the use of force, weapons of mass
destruction, and sanctions.
Our Approach
Our approach is not theoretically driven. When the contributors met in
January 2003, they debated key issues pertaining to the Council, joined by
a number of Council ambassadors. Helpfully urged on by Thomas M.
Franck, we did consider a number of possible models for the Council’s role
in international relations: an Athenian model, essentially consultative; a
Congress of Vienna conclave model under which the Council is devoted to
norm-development, as many in Washington would have us believe is the
Council’s most characteristic trait today; and a Roman model allowing for
mobilizational governance—under this scheme, the Council serves as a
senate constraining the emperor. In the post–Cold War era the Roman
model may apply best, with the U.S. president cast as emperor, but contemporary
history is proving sufficiently fluid that we were not persuaded that
any such theoretical approach would be profitable for this venture. We are
content to let our research and conclusions serve as theory fodder for
others.
One snare for any writer on the Security Council relates to its identity.
As a matter of convenience, authors sometimes refer to the Council when
they mean its members, a majority of its members, or only some of its
members. Another relates to assessments of UN “success” and “relevance.”
Differences of appreciation will be clear throughout the volume and in its
conclusions, being defined largely in the eye of individual beholders.
The table of contents makes clear our approach to the story. The first
section focuses on factors in Council decisionmaking that are new in the
post–Cold War era, often drivers of decisionmaking such as the humanitarian
impulse or terrorism. We move on to focus for several chapters on one
key change: the greater resort to the provisions of Chapter VII of the UN

4 INTRODUCTION
Charter allowing for the enforcement measures of sanctions and the use of
force. We then offer ten chapters covering evolving institutional factors
affecting the Council, from the role of NGOs to pressures for Council
reform. In order to illustrate a number of these themes, we offer eleven
brief case studies that we believe shed particular light on new approaches
by the Council. In the final section, we seek to offer an interpretation and
an integration of points raised in all these chapters, doing justice to none of
the contributors singly, but aiming to offer one possible synthesis of their
views. In neither this introduction nor in the final section do we follow the
order of the table of contents; rather, we seek to isolate key crosscutting
themes.
The End of the Cold War at the UN
How did the changes in the Council in the post–Cold War era come about?
The Council initially viewed its role as preventing a third world war. As the
Cold War came to define global politics, the Council moved to tackle prevention
of regional conflicts (often between client states or proxies of the
superpowers) from spilling into a global conflagration. In this, the Council
made a helpful contribution on several occasions.
One important signal of the decisive thaw in the Cold War was a
noticeable improvement in the climate among the permanent five (P-5)
members of the UN Security Council as of 1986. The first evidence of the
relaxation in East-West tensions within the Council was the cooperative
manner in which these countries discussed options for the position of UN
Secretary-General as Javier Pérez de Cuéllar’s first term drew to a close in
1986.
In late 1986, Sir John Thomson, the UK permanent representative to
the UN, took the initiative to call together the P-5 ambassadors, at his residence
away from UN headquarters and delegation offices, for an informal
discussion on how they could contribute to an early end of the murderous
Iran-Iraq War. 4 The others welcomed this initiative, although China apparently
remained reserved over P-5 activism for some time. A system of regular
P-5 informal meetings soon took hold. These meetings helped anticipate
and defuse conflicts among the five and allowed them to exchange notes on
their national positions respecting various crises of the hour, if not formally
to coordinate their positions.
As it turned out, the P-5 agreed without much difficulty to a second
term for the incumbent, who in January 1987 challenged them publicly to
tackle resolution of the Iran-Iraq War. 5 As of mid-1987, Security Council
proposals for a cease-fire, monitored by a small UN observer mission, were
making serious headway. The post–Cold War era, initially such a hopeful
one, had started at the UN.

DAVID M. MALONE 5
Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev’s celebrated Pravda and Izvestia
article of September 17, 1987, seeking “wider use of . . . the institution of
UN military observers and UN peacekeeping forces in disengaging the
troops of warring sides, observing cease-fires and armistice agreements,”
called for the P-5 to become “guarantors” of international security. 6
However, P-5 cooperation required some time to take root. 7
Converging perspectives among the P-5 on a number of international
crises, particularly on the need to disentangle the superpowers from them,
allowed the Council to initiate action toward settlements. Between 1988
and late 1989 it established five peacekeeping operations to assist the settlement
of conflicts in Afghanistan (UNGOMAP) and between Iran and
Iraq (UNIIMOG), to implement linked agreements on the withdrawal of
Cuban troops in Angola (UNAVEM I) and independence for Namibia
(UNTAG), and to help the resolution of three conflicts in Central America
(ONUCA).
While the end of the Cold War had to some extent already unlocked the
Council’s potential to contribute to the resolution of serious problems of
international peace and security, drawing on newfound cooperation
between the superpowers, the Council’s approach to conflicts remained relatively
cautious until the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.
Operation Desert Storm and Its Immediate Aftermath
This event, and Iraq’s formal annexation of Kuwait only days later, led the
Council to adopt a mandate authorizing the use of force by a coalition of
member states. 8 Council decisions on Iraq, including measures adopted following
the March 1991 end of hostilities to bring about the partial disarmament
of Iraq, to encourage protection of Iraqi minorities, and to provide
humanitarian assistance to the Kurdish population, were important not only
in their own right but also because they proved precedential in many
respects. 9
The success of the coalition’s military campaign against the Baghdad
regime, in retrospect, appears to have induced an era of euphoria in the
Council, an era that could not have arisen during the Cold War. 10 Having
successfully tackled a conceptually straightforward challenge to international
peace and security in the form of Saddam Hussein’s attack on
Kuwait, the Council now waded into the murkier waters of civil wars and
intercommunal strife, with which it had little experience. The Council
seemed to believe that because enforcement of its decisions against Iraq
had been successfully carried out, the constraints on and limitations of UN
peacekeeping had fallen away. This era of euphoria can be described as
lasting roughly between March 6, 1991, the date of Resolution 686, on the
end of hostilities in the Gulf region, and October 13, 1993, when the

6 INTRODUCTION
Council adopted Resolution 873 following the failure to deploy successfully
the UN Mission in Haiti (UNMIH)—this only a week after the deaths of
eighteen U.S. Army Rangers in Somalia had seriously undermined
prospects for the sustainability there of UNOSOM II. 11 The unique circumstances
of the Gulf crisis, notably the threat that supplies of petroleum, the
lifeblood of the major Western economies, could be cut off, did not recur.
Consequently, neither did the unity of purpose that characterized international
response to Iraq’s attack on Kuwait. During this period of barely thirty-one
months, the Council accelerated the pace of its work, adopting 185
resolutions, versus 685 in the preceding forty-six years of UN history, and
launching fifteen new peacekeeping operations as compared to seventeen in
the previous forty-six years. 12
Building on an emerging view in much of the world that the UN
Security Council was at last coming into its own, the first ever Security
Council summit was convened January 31, 1992, to discuss new orientations
and activities for the Council. The summit’s statement, the high-water
mark of enthusiasm over a purported new international order, noted (optimistically)
that “the Security Council has begun to fulfill more effectively
its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and
security.” 13
Recently elected Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali responded
with a wide-ranging, thoughtful, and ambitious document, An Agenda
for Peace. This report advocated, inter alia, consideration in certain circumstances
of a “preventive deployment” of UN peacekeepers to forestall
hostilities known to be looming; and, when circumstances warranted,
the use of force by the UN itself rather than by coalitions of member
states. 14 An Agenda for Peace noted that peacekeeping had been carried
out “hitherto” with the consent of all parties, hinting that this might not
be necessary in the future. It seemed to assume a quantum leap in the
willingness by member states to support UN action in the peace and
security field.
By January 1995, following serious setbacks in Bosnia and the inability
to stop the genocide in Rwanda, the UN’s most disastrous failure in
decades, Boutros-Ghali, in the Supplement to an Agenda for Peace (more
of a reassessment than an addendum), was sounding a more “realistic”
note, drawing lessons from the UN’s experience on the ground over previous
years: “Neither the Security Council nor the Secretary-General at present
has the capacity to deploy, direct, command or control [enforcement]
operations except perhaps on a very limited scale. . . . It would be folly to
attempt to do so at the present time when the Organization is resourcestarved
and hard pressed to handle the less demanding peacemaking and
peacekeeping responsibilities entrusted to it.” 15

DAVID M. MALONE 7
Major Trends
Emergence of the Permanent Five
The much improved climate among the P-5 in the post–Cold War era can be
gauged by the sharp decline in the use of the veto: only 12 substantive
vetoes were invoked from January 1990 to June 2003, compared to 193
during the first forty-five years of the UN’s history. 16 Veto threats remained
highly relevant, as the Council’s dealings on Kosovo in 1999 and Iraq in
early 2003 make clear, but very few issues seriously divided the P-5 after
1987 (the Arab-Israeli conflict remaining one of them). The ability and disposition
of the five permanent members—those holding veto power—to
cooperate with each other seriously diminished the margin for maneuver of
other Council members, as several chapters in this volume make clear (such
as Chapter 16, on Council working methods, by Susan Hulton, and several
case studies by a variety of contributors). Some of them, including Finland
and Canada, had in earlier times developed skills and occupied political
space as “helpful fixers”; or, in the case of some developing nations, had
learned how to play the permanent members against each other, greatly
amplifying the voice and enhancing the apparent influence of the nonaligned
movement within the Council. 17
Soon, however, elected members were grumbling that they were systematically
marginalized, a complaint given more weight by a tendency of
the Secretariat to consult privately with some or all of the P-5 before
advancing recommendations to the Council as a whole. Chapter 17, on relations
between permanent and elected members of the Council, by Kishore
Mahbubani, an ambassador representing a nonpermanent member of the
Council, makes clear why this dynamic is grating and may have proved
counterproductive over time. Tacit collusion between the P-5 and the
Secretariat was aggravated, from the perspective of other members, by the
growing resort to “informal consultations” for decisionmaking purposes
rather than the open Council meetings that had served as the principal
forum for Council decisionmaking in earlier decades. 18 High-handed
behavior by the P-5 reached a zenith in December 2002, when the United
States forced the Council presidency to reverse a Council decision on
access to a report by UNMOVIC and inspectors of the International Atomic
Energy Agency, insisting on differentiated arrangements for permanent and
elected members, a highly undignified (and unusually public) process
widely denounced, not least by Kofi Annan. 19
The P-5 do not “manage” the Council, although they do dominate it,
not least by monopolizing most of the drafting. Scheduling is coordinated
by the presidency, and individual agenda items have increasingly been
managed by limited-membership steering groups, often “Groups of

8 INTRODUCTION
Friends” (generally but not always composed of Council and recent past
Council members), who along with the Secretary-General propose options
and preferred courses of action to the Council as a whole. Teresa Whitfield
examines this important, often controversial, recent development in
Chapter 21.
The Permanent One
It would be misleading to suggest that the P-5 are not only often cohesive
but also equal. It has been clear for some years, perhaps mostly strikingly
so since the Dayton Accords of late 1995, that the United States has
emerged not only as the sole remaining superpower but also as the principal
driver of the Council’s agenda and decisions, passively and actively. This
development introduced new challenges into management of the Council’s
goals, work, and decisions, for both good and ill, as discussed by Nathan
Miller and Frederick Rawski in Chapter 24, on the U.S. relationship with
the Security Council, sometimes described elsewhere as an effort at dual
containment. 20
An Expanding Agenda: Substantive Innovation
The post–Cold War period has been marked by the Council’s disposition to
tackle many more conflicts than it had been able to earlier, when it was
stymied by East-West animosities and the plethora of vetoes (cast and
threatened) by the permanent members. The end of the Cold War unlocked
implementation of the Council’s earlier decisions on Namibia, as documented
in Chapter 27 in Cedric Thornberry’s gripping account of this early
episode of UN-controlled transitional arrangements. Since 1990 there have
been momentous shifts in the Council’s approach to conflict and its resolution.
Factors held by the Council as constituting a threat to international
peace expanded to include a coup against a democratically elected regime
(documented in Chapter 31, on Haiti, coauthored by Sebastian von
Einsiedel and myself, and in Chapter 5, on democratization, by Gregory
Fox); a range of humanitarian catastrophes (discussed in Chapter 30, on
Bosnia, by Mats Berdal, and in Chapter 35, on East Timor, by Stewart
Eldon), particularly those generating large outflows of displaced persons
and refugees, internally and internationally (as discussed in Chapter 3 by
Thomas Weiss); and acts of terrorism (as cataloged in Chapter 6 by Edward
Luck). 21 Steven Ratner, in Chapter 37, on the role of the Council in international
law, explores some of the relevant issues.
This, in turn, allowed the Council to act on a range of conflicts, mostly
internal in nature, which it most likely would have avoided in the past,
when the Cold War antagonists often played out their hostility through
regional proxies and were prepared to frustrate Council involvement. These

DAVID M. MALONE 9
included conflicts in El Salvador (discussed in Chapter 28 by Blanca
Antonini); Sierra Leone (detailed in Chapter 33 by John Hirsch); the former
Yugoslavia (dealt with in this volume most directly by Mats Berdal in
Chapter 30, and Paul Heinbecker in Chapter 34); Mozambique (dissected in
Chapter 29 by Aldo Ajello and Patrick Wittmann); and Rwanda (discussed
in Chapter 32 by Howard Adelman and Astri Suhrke, and enriched by separate
insider accounts from Colin Keating and Ibrahim Gambari in Chapters
32.1 and 32.2). In many of these conflicts, the Security Council found itself
contending with armed nonstate actors, a new phenomenon addressed here
in Chapter 8 by Andrés Franco. The Council’s decisions in the 1990s
proved highly innovative in shaping the normative framework for international
relations and stimulated several radical legal developments at the
international level, notably the creation of international criminal tribunals
for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in 1993 and 1994 respectively. This
greatly intensified pressure for a more universal International Criminal
Court (ICC), a statute for which was adopted at a diplomatic conference in
Rome in 1998. These developments are covered in this volume by ICC
judge Philippe Kirsch, John Holmes, and Mora Johnson in Chapter 19. As
Cameron Hume argues in Chapter 38, the Council will have to continue to
be creative in adapting to new challenges posed by failing states and
transnational threats.
Interstate conflicts did not altogether cease to break out, as Chapter 36
by Adekeye Adebajo, on the Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict of the late 1990s,
demonstrates. However, with very few exceptions, the wreckage of the
Cold War was successfully addressed once the superpower confrontation
came to an end. Certain conflicts of an earlier era, such as the Israeli-Arab
dispute, addressed by Bruce Jones in Chapter 26, and the worrying tensions
over Kashmir, still bedevil the international agenda, but they are rare. Peter
Wallensteen and Patrik Johansson, in Chapter 2, make clear that, contrary
to media and public perceptions, conflict is on the decline and there are few
reasons to harbor nostalgia for the nuclear terror–induced “stability” of the
Cold War.
An intriguing trend relates to the Council’s role in mandating UN roles
in the oversight of territories. This occurred not only in Namibia and
Eastern Slavonia but also, in a less comprehensive form, in Cambodia and
Bosnia. It reached its zenith in Kosovo, touched upon in Chapter 34 by
Paul Heinbecker, and East Timor, covered in Chapter 35 by Stewart Eldon
and supplemented in Chapter 35.1 with a separate view from the field by
Ian Martin. The Council’s role in mandating such “virtual trusteeships” is
discussed in Chapter 15 in a crosscutting manner by Simon Chesterman.
Nevertheless, in the late 1990s, serious tensions resurfaced in the
Council over issues relating to state sovereignty, legitimation of the use of
force, and the growing incidence of unilateralism by some major UN mem-

10 INTRODUCTION
bers. Differences crystallized in 1998 and 1999 over conflicting objectives
and approaches among the P-5 to Iraq and Kosovo. While discord over
Kosovo was contained by agreement on the parameters of a UN-administered
transitional regime in this territory, the agreement was achieved at the
price of lack of clarity over future constitutional arrangements and could
hold the seeds of future problems. Iraq remained highly nettlesome, with
the P-5 coming together on key resolutions such as 1284 and 1441, but ultimately
deadlocked by mid-March 2003, when military action against Iraq
was initiated by the United States and several of its allies.
The ebb and flow of Council business has tended to obscure the extent
to which its decisions cumulatively since 1990 have undermined rigid conceptions
of state sovereignty and eroded the position of governments claiming
the sovereign right to conduct themselves at home free of international
interference, even on matters that could undermine domestic security and
the stability not only of their own countries but eventually of neighboring
ones (for example, by massively abusing human rights or engaging in ethnic
engineering or cleansing).
Chapter VII of the UN Charter
Prior to 1990 there was little resort to those provisions in the UN Charter
relating to the coercive measures the Council can invoke. Mandatory sanctions
were imposed by the Council in only two instances: Southern
Rhodesia in 1966 and South Africa in 1977. A naval blockade to enforce
the Rhodesia sanctions regime was authorized but rapidly failed once it
became clear that force would not be used to back it up. The use of force
itself was explicitly authorized only in the case of Korea in the early 1950s
(in the absence from the Council of the Soviet Union), and in a much more
tentative and limited way in the Congo in the early 1960s. The latter
episode was not widely considered a success, confirming in many the view
that the use of force should be avoided by the Council in its decisionmaking.
With the new mood among the P-5, the Council, with several
intractable conflicts on its agenda, moved rapidly in the post–Cold War era
to impose its will on a range of international actors through a dizzying
array of sanctions regimes (occasionally backed up by naval blockades)
discussed in Chapter 11 by David Cortright and George Lopez and through
the frequent authorization of force, both by troops under UN command and
by coalitions of member states. In Chapter 13, David Angell adds a personal
comment on Canada’s efforts to ensure a degree of enforcement of the
sanctions regime against UNITA in Angola. New issues, such as internal
disarmament, became subject to enforcement, notably in Iraq as discussed
in admirably dispassionate fashion by Pascal Teixeira da Silva in Chapter

DAVID M. MALONE 11
14. Adam Roberts discusses in Chapter 9 the links between the use of force,
international law, and the authority of the security council, while Frank
Berman dissects in Chapter 10 perhaps the most famous of the enforcement
resolutions, 678 of November 1990, on Iraq. Chapter VII decisions occasionally
gave rise to significant tensions among the permanent five, as documented
in Chapter 12 by Peter van Walsum in a personal account of his
two years as chair of the Council’s Iraq sanctions committee. Much of this
struggle unfolded privately, although insightful reporting by Colum Lynch
of the Washington Post and Carola Hoyos of the Financial Times occasionally
revealed it through the media.
While the Council’s assertive exploration of the Chapter VII provisions
initially seemed to hold out the hope that a new world order could be constructed
with the UN at its center, many of the coercive strategies of the
Council failed because of the application of insufficient or inappropriate
resources, wishful thinking, and a flight from reality that seemed to overtake
the Council in the years 1992–1995. Doubtless a sense of individual
responsibility of member states was seriously undermined by the mechanics
and compromises of committee decisionmaking, but several instances
of spectacular Council failure seem no less lurid years later than they did in
the headlines of the day, notably those arising from the UN’s involvement
in Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda.
Because of a greater resort to the Council to authorize the use of force
internationally, but also because of a noticeable tendency to avoid doing so
in certain cases, arguments have grown that, even beyond narrowly constructed
cases of self-defense, explicit Council authorization for the use of
force may no longer be required, however politically useful it can prove.
Institutional Factors
During its early decades, the Council had few institutional partners. This
has changed radically since the early 1990s. Today, due to limited resources
and for reasons of substantive burden-sharing, the Council’s decisions often
foresee cooperation with regional organizations (broadly defined to include
such institutions as NATO as well as more classic regional organizations as
originally envisaged in Chapter VIII of the UN Charter). This trend is discussed
in Chapter 20 by Shepard Forman and Andrew Grene. NGOs have
also come to play an important role, although a largely unheralded one, in
the Council’s life. James Paul discusses aspects of this development in
Chapter 25, as does Joanna Weschler in Chapter 4, on human rights in the
life of the Council.
The relationship between the Secretary-General and the Security
Council is explored in Chapter 18 by Marrack Goulding, the UN’s premier
negotiator for many years, who contrasts the tenure of Secretary-General

12 INTRODUCTION
Boutros Boutros-Ghali (1992–1996) with that of Secretary-General Javier
Pérez de Cuéllar (1982–1991). He (and Mahbubani) make clear that the
Secretariat’s relationship with the Council is often intermediated by the P-
5. In Chapter 22, Connie Peck offers an account of that increasingly ubiquitous
figure in international relations, the special representative of the UN
Secretary-General, mostly responsible for overseeing complex peace operations
or mediation efforts in the field. The Council’s relationship with these
individuals has varied in form and substance but is increasingly recognized
as important. In a Council retreat during December 2002, extensive discussion
occurred on the function and importance of appropriate incumbents. 22
With the more active role played by the Council in international relations
has come pressure for Council reform under several headings: its
working methods, composition, and the veto all came under heavy criticism
as of the early 1990s. However, pressure for reform has achieved little
change beyond the Council’s increasingly open working methods, as discussed
by Bardo Fassbender in Chapter 23, and there is little prospect of
early agreement among the membership on significant change in years to
come, not least because it is widely accepted that there is a tradeoff
between expansion of the Council, to achieve a more representative composition,
and effectiveness of the body, which continues to be much prized by
a number of powerful governments. While most countries have developed a
scheme for Council reform perfectly tailored to maximizing their own situation
with respect to a reformed Council, their preferred fallback is not
some other country’s scheme but the status quo.
The Media
The media play an important role in the life of the Council, often producing
international pressure for action to address man-made disasters or to head
off cataclysms, including those concerning North Korea and Iraq and
potentially involving weapons of mass destruction. The Cable News
Network (CNN) has often been described as the Council’s “sixteenth member,”
and its UN bureau has done much through its weekly program
“Diplomatic License” to make the Council and its decisions better understood.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has consistently sought
to interpret insightfully iconic images of Council ambassadors meeting in
the fabled Council chamber and then delivering themselves of competitive
but often misleading (and soon forgotten) pronouncements on the proceedings.
The media influence the Council most strongly through its member
states. Governments react to public pressure, largely shaped by the media.
Governments mostly like to tax and spend. By and large, they are averse to
risk. Thus, when international crises develop and public pressure to address

DAVID M. MALONE 13
them builds through the media, a default option for governments is to delegate
to multilateral organizations such as the UN the responsibility to
respond.
That said, media reporting of the Council itself is mostly reactive and
event-driven. The Council’s “home” broadsheet, the New York Times, has
given it considerable attention, often in commendable depth through the
writing of Barbara Crossette and James Traub. The Paris daily Le Monde
has also done an excellent job of looking beyond the wire service headlines,
and the Financial Times has fielded talented correspondents at the
UN. 23 However, there may not be much more to be said, and we consequently
do not offer a chapter specifically covering this topic.
Envoi
In order to set the stage, Peter Wallensteen, one of the world’s foremost
thinkers on both the nature and the pattern of violent conflicts today,
together with Patrik Johansson, discusses in Chapter 2 the trends in Council
decisions in recent years. Thereafter, as outlined above, we address a number
of individual factors and cases relevant to the Council’s performance in
the post–Cold War era. Our conclusions aim to offer a range of broader thematic
observations.
Notes
1. Sydney D. Bailey and Sam Daws, The Procedure of the Security Council,
3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998).
2. Brian Urquhart, “The UN and International Security after the Cold War,”
and Anthony Parsons, “The UN and the National Interests of States,” in Adam
Roberts and Benedict Kingsbury, eds., United Nations, Divided World: The UN’s
Roles in International Relations, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), pp. 81–124.
3. Andrew Boyd, Fifteen Men on a Powder Keg: A History of the UN
Security Council (New York: Stein and Day, 1971).
4. For an account of evolving dynamics within the UN Security Council, particularly
among the P-5, 1986–1990, see Cameron Hume, The United Nations, Iran,
and Iraq: How Peacemaking Changed (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press,
1994), esp. pp. 81–82, 88–102.
5. SG/SM/3956, January 13, 1987, p. 5.
6. Mikhail S. Gorbachev, “Reality and the Guarantees of a Secure World,”
FBIS Daily Report: Soviet Union, September 17, 1987, pp. 23–28.
7. Interviews with Alexander M. Belonogov, permanent representative of the
USSR to the UN, 1986–1990, and John Thomson, permanent representative of the
UK to the UN, 1982–1987, conducted respectively in Ottawa on March 20, 1996,
and in Princeton on April 15, 1996.
8. Resolution 678, November 29, 1990. Operation Desert Storm originally
was confined to aerial attacks on Iraq. The broader military campaign was designated
as Operation Desert Saber, but the moniker Desert Storm eventually displaced it.

14 INTRODUCTION
9. A number of the measures adopted by France, the UK, the United States,
and their allies, particularly in northern Iraq (to protect, through a no-fly zone, and
provide assistance to the Kurds), were initiated without explicit Council authorization.
These measures were, however, not then seriously challenged within the
Council. Some of the humanitarian activities of Operation Provide Comfort were
eventually taken over by the UN.
10. Contributing importantly to the unity of the international community in
confronting Saddam Hussein in 1990 was an impressive diplomatic campaign by
President George H. W. Bush, his secretary of state, James Baker, and their skilled
U.S. ambassador at the UN, Thomas Pickering, to assemble a formidable diplomatic
coalition to this end. These conditions were not reproduced in 2002 when the
United States sought to increase pressure on the Baghdad regime.
11. Resolution 873 reimposed sanctions on Haiti.
12. During this period, the UN launched the following new peacekeeping
operations: UNIKOM in Kuwait (1991), MINURSO for Western Sahara (1991),
ONUSAL in El Salvador (1991), UNAVEM II in Angola (1991), UNAMIC in
Cambodia (1991), UNPROFOR in the former Yugoslavia (1992), UNTAC in
Cambodia (1992), UNOSOM in Somalia (1992), ONUMOZ in Mozambique
(1992), UNOSOM II (1993), UNOMUR in Uganda-Rwanda (1993), UNOMIG in
Georgia (1993), UNOMIL in Liberia (1993), UNMIH in Haiti (1993), and
UNAMIR in Rwanda (1993). In addition, the Council authorized the U.S.-led
Unified Task Force in Somalia (UNITAF, 1992), and a UNPROFOR presence, in
effect a preventive deployment, in Macedonia (1992).
13. S/23500, January 31, 1992, p. 2.
14. A/47/277, June 17, 1992.
15. A/50/60, January 3, 1995, p. 18.
16. All vetoes since May 1990 were by the United States (mostly on the
Israeli-Palestinian struggle), except for two by Russia (one over the financing of
UNFICYP in Cyprus and another over sanctions against Serbia), and two by China
(both on peacekeeping operations, one in Guatemala, the other in the former
Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, although each was motivated by a Taiwan connection).
This count does not include vetoes on the selection of the UN Secretary-
General, mostly registered during nonpublic sessions of the Council.
17. During periods when seven members of the nonaligned movement sit in
the Council, they theoretically possess a “sixth veto.” By all withholding consent
simultaneously, they can block resolutions. However, the cohesion of the movement
has proved weak within the Council in recent years (although it was displayed to a
degree in March 2003 on Iraq).
18. For an account of the evolving dynamics within the Security Council, see
Hume, The United Nations, Iran, and Iraq; and C. S. R. Murthy, “Change and
Continuity in the Functioning of the Security Council Since the End of the Cold
War,” International Studies 32, no. 4 (October–December 1995): 423.
19. Julia Preston, “U.S. Is First to Get a Copy of Report on Iraqi Weapons,”
New York Times, December 10, 2002.
20. See Simon Chesterman and David M. Malone, “High Stakes: The Fate of
the Security Council,” International Herald Tribune, January 27, 2003.
21. How far the Council’s agenda has opened up to nontraditional issues can
be gauged from its refusal in 1989 to accede to UK pressure for discussion of international
narcotrafficking and environmental issues as potential threats to peace,
while on January 10, 2000, under a U.S. presidency (in the person of Vice President
Al Gore), it engaged in a debate on the implications of the AIDS pandemic in Africa
for stability and peace on that continent in the twenty-first century.

DAVID M. MALONE 15
22. S/2002/1388, December 20, 2002.
23. In fact, all three of the major wire services, Agence France Presse, the
Associated Press, and Reuters, report very well on the UN through insightful and
sharp correspondents, but the nature of their clientele discourages extensive analysis.
The Inter-Press Service, an agency favoring developing-country perspectives,
has done well at the UN on this latter score.